04 August 2008

Green Guilt

A lot of mainstream journalists seem to enjoy lamenting how painfully difficult it is to go green, and try to tell activists to stop nagging if they want to get their point across. A recent Baltimore Sun article, in fact, made a great point about how the writer’s grandmother was effortlessly environmentally friendly, by virtue of being a low income immigrant in the early half of the century, but then failed to realize the implications of this and chose instead to spend her article whining about how annoying it is when you take a Starbucks cup home to recycle and it spills in your car.

Well boohoo.

My grandmother always reused foil and paper napkins and compulsively hoarded spare buttons and brushes and bits of things until the family began to wonder if there wasn’t something a bit wrong with her head. I, on the other hand, eventually came to the realization that this was the natural product of being the child of Polish immigrants raised during the Depression and World War II- of course you wouldn’t throw away a napkin, when you might be able to use it again.

The authors of these articles are right in pointing out that going green on an individual level shouldn’t be about the numeric value of your carbon footprint. You won’t get anywhere if you’re beating yourself up over every last lumen of light. It’s more about an attitude. If you’ve adjusted your thought to believe that it simply doesn’t make sense to throw things away (particularly if you are a penny pinching pack rat like me), suddenly it doesn’t seem like a big effort to use cloth napkins. Saves me trips to the grocery store, for one. And a more appropriate response to the annoyance of spilling leftover coffee in an effort to recycle would be, rather than whining about the mess, to ask why she was going to Starbucks and getting a plastic cup in the first place.

This may sound strange and masochistic to many people. Imagine! The pain and suffering that may be caused by not going to Starbucks. Or, imagine instead, the ease of taking your own mug (which is much more sturdy anyway). Or instead of taking your coffee with you, spending a half hour in the coffee shop drinking your coffee out of a mug and reading a good book. Heaven forbid!

I have no patience for people who tell me it’s so hard to be green. If you think about it, it’s much harder NOT to be green. It’s expensive. The food isn’t very good. You have to go to the store all the time. You have lots of trash to deal with (I take out the trash once every two weeks, and it’s a tiny bag). There’s a lot of driving involved… I could go on. Or, you could live in a way that makes sense. I make my own yogurt because I don’t like additives and single use, individual serving containers, and it’s easy (took me ten minutes this morning) and delicious. And cheap. I make my own pasta sauce, which is slightly more labor intensive, but the joy I get out of the happy, sated smiles on my friends’ faces when I bring them jars of sauce is more than worth the effort. Plus, I freeze it and eat it all winter, so I don’t have to cook for months at a time. I also only use handkerchiefs. My great grandmother made them and I still have them, and not only are they softer on my nose, but I don’t buy tissues, I don’t have enormous amounts of trash, and every time I use them I think of her.

And when I think of her, and my grandmother, I think, how would they have done this? And rather than whining in a major newspaper about how reduce-reuse-recycle was so much easier for them because they lived through the Depression (still working out the logic on that one), I just do it. And I have to admit, it’s pretty easy.

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